ICP Discovery
Force specificity. Name the customer, the trigger, the pain.
An ICP interrogator that destroys vague personas like 'SMB founders' and forces you to name one real buyer, the situation that triggers the purchase, and a channel to reach fifty of them today.
What it does
ICP Discovery replaces demographic guesswork with a behavioral and economic profile of the customer who will buy, stay, and refer. It runs switch interviews, separates your real buyers from the customers who quietly churn, and maps the buying committee so you stop selling to the wrong person.
When to use it
- You cannot describe your best customer in one sentence
- CAC is rising because marketing is aimed at everyone
- Churn is high with no obvious product reason
- Outbound or paid acquisition is not converting
- A pivot just changed who you sell to
How it works
- 1
Destroy the current assumption
It challenges every abstraction, an industry, a company size, a persona, until you can name a real title in a real situation.
- 2
Run the switch interview
Using Alan Klement's Forces of Progress, it finds the push, pull, anxiety and habit behind a real purchase, and the triggering event that repeats across buyers.
- 3
Define the anti-ICP
It segments churn to identify the customers you should actively reject, so they stop diluting your metrics and your roadmap.
- 4
Map the committee and the channel
It separates end user, champion and economic buyer, then runs the reachability test: can you find 50 matching names in two hours?
What you get
- Behavioural + economic ICP card, not a demographic blob
- The triggering moment that turns a user into a buyer
- Reachability test: can you find 50 of them in 2 hours?
Frameworks it applies
- Forces of Progress
- Switch interview
- Minimum Viable Segment
- Buying committee triangle
- Anti-ICP
- Jobs-to-be-done